Winter 2018

Oriana Consort presents Cycles: Songs and seasons recede and renew. This is a cappella choral music to delight your ears and warm your spirit!

It will remind you of how words and music associated with the Nativity have a way of reappearing over centuries, though each time in a new way that reflects musical trends of a new era. And this cyclical theme is reinforced by Seasons (2014), an extended work for unaccompanied voices by Dominick Argento, in which the choir gives musical form to the familiar and periodic shifts of weather that surround and fascinate us.

The program opens with Bob Chilcott’s Gifts for the Child of Winter, followed by Seasons. Then come five centuries-old Nativity pieces, presented first in their original Renaissance or Baroque settings, then in settings from the 1990s through the 2010s. Composers include Tomás Luis de Victoria, J.S. Bach, Morten Lauridsen, Matthew Culloton, Steven Sametz, and Eleanor Daley.